Dear SaaStr: What Are The Top 5 Things I Should Know Before Starting a SaaS Startup? My Top 5: It will take you at least 24 months to really get anywhere. Everyone mentally budgets 10–12 months. It’s never enough. At least, not to get enough paying customers from Code...
Two successful SaaS leaders talk about product alignment, freemium models, having an open-source product and other topics in SaaS we all want answers to.
Dear SaaStr: What are The Most Common Mistakes Founders Make When They Are Just Starting to Scale Revenue? Let me list some of the ones I see most often going from say $1m to $10m in ARR: Chasing the Shiny Penny. One of the biggest mistakes I see after $1m in trying...
Dear SaaStr: How Do I Best Prevent Churn? You don’t. Instead, you drive it down. Each quarter. You can’t eliminate churn. It’s a fact of business life in selling a product with recurring revenue and thus recurring sales. You can hide churn (e.g., by signing multiyear...
Dear SaaStr: How Can an Early Stage SaaS Startup Get its First 1-3 Pilot Fortune 500 Paying Customers? It’s not magic. And it’s not a mystery. Even though it can seem like it, until you’ve done it yourself. There are basically two paths, and one...
Dear SaaStr: How Would You Invest a 5 Million Dollar Payout From an Acquisition? Bear in mind I’m not a CFA, CPA, or professional financial advisor. But I have been through it. And so I know this is a more difficult question to answer than you might think. The...
Dear SaaStr: A Co-Founder is Asking for More Equity Post Fundraising. What Should I Do? Listen. It usually means something is wrong. Or at least, off: If you got the equity splits right at first, usually, big issues don’t come up later. This may be a sign you need to...
Dear SaaStr: What Would Be The Single Most Important Advice You Would Give Other Entrepreneurs? Quit today if you don’t want it bad enough. But … never quit if you truly do. … Now, by “quit” I don’t literally mean leave the keys on your...
Dear SaaStr: What Should Happen When a Co-founder Wants to Quit? This is one of the toughest situations to be in. First, figure out if it’s just anxiety. Starting something is hard. Getting to the first $1m in ARR is borderline impossible. If it’s “just” anxiety, and...
Dear SaaStr: What’s Your Best Advice for Struggling Entrepreneurs? Having struggled a lot myself in the early days several times … just a few thoughts to summarize my learnings: 1. Get help & upgrade the team. This is the #1 thing you can do to move...
Dear SaaStr: How Do You Keep Yourself From Getting Fired as a Founder CEO? First, note it isn’t easy to get fired as a founder CEO. Especially if you haven’t raised all that much money. I’ll leave the legal and contractual answers to others. But...
We’re gearing up for our biggest, best-est SaaStr Europa 2024 (June 4-5 in London!) and SaaStr Annual 2024 (Sep 10-12 in SF Bay again!) As part of that, we’re taking a look back at some of the best sessions ever. When both of HubSpot’s co-founders...
There's a moment in time in every SaaS company where money doesn't really matter anymore. You have enough to hit your goals. And there's a much earlier moment in time where every single dollar matters. Between the two is the art of investing your balance...
Dear SaaStr: Is There Any “Con” In Giving Our Sales Tool For Free to Early-Stage Startups? Free of course can real work, done right.: Slack Zoom Canva All built massive businesses on the back of very Free editions, even if they later turned more...
Dear SaaStr: What is The Average Ratio of Support Staff to Customer Count in SaaS? Typically support consumes about perhaps 5%-7% of your revenue at scale (excluding customer success) in most SaaS models. It could be more or less, but that’s a rough way to think about...